Maybe We Don't Have Shorter Attention Spans. Maybe Things Are Just More Boring.

Apparently, the average human now has the attention span of a goldfish.

Eight seconds.

Which is devastating news, particularly for anyone who has ever watched a 94-minute documentary about a scam they had never heard of until Netflix asked, Are you still watching?

Yes, Netflix. I am.

I haven't moved in three hours.

Please stop judging me.

For years, we've been told that our attention spans are collapsing. Smartphones destroyed them. TikTok finished the job. Generation Z can no longer concentrate unless somebody is simultaneously explaining a mortgage, chopping a cucumber and falling down a staircase in the bottom half of the screen.

It is a wonderfully convenient theory.

Especially if you make boring things.

Because if people stop watching your video, abandon your article, ignore your presentation or close your website, there are two possible explanations.

One is that human cognition has undergone a catastrophic transformation.

The other is that Steve from Corporate Communications made a seven-minute video about "our commitment to excellence."

Naturally, we chose neuroscience.

First, an apology to the goldfish

The famous claim that humans have an eight-second attention span, supposedly one second less than a goldfish, is not quite the scientific fact it has been presented as.

The number became famous through a 2015 Microsoft Canada report, but it wasn't actually produced by Microsoft's own research. The report attributed the figure to another source. A subsequent BBC investigation traced the statistic and found no solid research supporting the famous comparison.

Which means marketers spent years telling audiences they had less concentration than a small orange animal based on a statistic nobody could properly locate.

The goldfish, meanwhile, declined to comment.

This does not mean nothing has changed.

Something clearly has.

Research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has tracked how long people remain focused on one screen before switching. In 2004, her research found an average of around two and a half minutes. By around 2012, it was 75 seconds. More recent measurements have put it at roughly 47 seconds.

Forty-seven seconds sounds terrible.

Until you notice what is actually being measured.

It isn't "the maximum amount of time the human brain can pay attention."

It is how long people stay on one screen before moving to another.

Those are not the same thing.

I switch between my email, browser and WhatsApp while working. This does not mean every 47 seconds my brain shuts down like an overheating microwave.

It means I switched windows.

We didn't lose the ability to pay attention. We gained the ability to leave.

This is where things become more interesting.

For most of human history, boredom had terrible distribution.

If you were sitting through something dull, your alternatives were limited. You could continue listening. You could stare at a wall. You could examine your fingernails. If things became truly desperate, you could develop an inner life.

Today, boredom has competition.

Your phone contains TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, football scores, the news, your friends, your enemies, your bank account, six people currently on holiday in Puglia, and a man in Seoul preparing an egg in a way you've apparently been doing wrong your entire life.

And all of it is one thumb movement away.

Maybe attention didn't get shorter. The distance to something more interesting did.

That changes the economics of attention completely.

A 2019 study published in Nature Communications examined attention across multiple cultural datasets and found that topics appear to rise and disappear from collective attention increasingly quickly. The researchers connected this acceleration partly to growing flows of information and competition between topics.

In other words, your article isn't merely competing with other articles about your subject.

It is competing with everything.

This paragraph is technically competing with a dog wearing sunglasses.

I appreciate your loyalty.

Unfortunately, boredom has research

The uncomfortable part for anyone producing content is that attention depends partly on the thing receiving the attention.

Research on reading has found that topic interest predicts mind wandering. When people are more interested, their minds tend to wander less. Earlier research similarly found relationships between text difficulty, interest, mind wandering and comprehension.

Which sounds almost insultingly obvious.

Scientists conducted experiments and eventually discovered that people pay more attention when they're interested.

Somewhere, a television executive whispered, "Get me Harvard."

But the point matters because marketing often treats attention as if it exists independently of what we're showing people.

"The audience has a short attention span."

Maybe.

But which audience?

Watching what?

For what reason?

A person who skips your 20-second branded video may spend three hours listening to a podcast about the Roman Empire, 45 minutes watching someone restore a chair and an entire Saturday learning how an obscure murder was solved because somebody found pollen on a shoe.

The same human.

The same brain.

Very different levels of voluntary imprisonment.

And then we invented the cure for boredom: more boredom

Here is where the story becomes almost beautifully stupid.

When digital media made switching easier, we assumed the solution was to give people even more things to switch between.

Shorter clips.

Faster edits.

More hooks.

More cuts.

More notifications.

More "WAIT FOR IT."

More men pointing aggressively at captions.

More videos beginning with, "You're doing coffee WRONG."

I was making coffee. Apparently I had entered a competitive event without realizing it.

But research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found something wonderfully inconvenient.

Across seven experiments involving 1,223 participants, Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht found that people switched digital media when bored and believed switching would help.

It often didn't.

Switching between and within videos could make participants more bored, while reducing attention, satisfaction and meaning.

Think about the elegance of what we've built.

We become bored.

So we switch.

The switching makes us more bored.

So we switch again.

We have essentially invented a slot machine where the jackpot is feeling mildly dissatisfied forever.

Tam and Inzlicht later argued in Communications Psychology that digital media may contribute to boredom through several mechanisms, including divided attention, increased expectations for stimulation, diminished meaning and greater awareness of alternative things we could be doing.

There is always another option.

Which means every experience now carries a tiny invisible question:

"Is there something better?"

And your phone answers:

"Almost certainly. Shall I show you 700 examples?"

We responded by making everything shorter

This is where brands, media and creators may have diagnosed the wrong disease.

We saw audiences leaving and concluded:

MAKE IT SHORTER.

Then everybody made it shorter.

And faster.

And louder.

And more optimized.

Every video got a hook.

Every presentation got three words per slide.

Every article got a "three-minute read."

Every CEO discovered vertical video.

Every person on LinkedIn started opening posts with:

"I wasn't going to share this."

And yet, somehow, they found the strength.

The problem is that when everybody uses the same techniques to capture attention, those techniques become part of the wallpaper.

When every video has a hook, the hook stops being a hook. It becomes furniture.

There is nothing wrong with short content. Some ideas need six seconds. Some need sixty minutes.

The mistake is believing duration creates interest.

It doesn't.

Short boring content is still boring.

It just ends sooner.

Attention is not charity

None of this lets technology completely off the hook.

Constant notifications, multitasking and rapidly changing digital environments clearly affect how we allocate attention. Gloria Mark's research on switching is real, and Tam and Inzlicht's work suggests our digital habits can create feedback loops that make sustained engagement harder.

But that is very different from saying modern humans have simply lost the ability to focus.

Perhaps we've become more selective.

Perhaps opportunity cost has become visible.

Perhaps we're accustomed to higher stimulation.

Perhaps the supply of things asking for our attention has exploded faster than the supply of attention itself.

And perhaps, occasionally, the webinar really is terrible.

For marketers, creators, media companies and brands, that distinction matters.

If you believe people cannot pay attention, your strategy becomes:

How do I make this shorter?

If you believe people will pay attention when the perceived reward justifies it, the question becomes much harder:

How do I make this worth their time?

That question cannot be solved by editing a 45-second video down to 22 seconds.

Sometimes you have to improve the idea.

Which is unfortunate because trimming twelve seconds in Premiere was considerably easier.

We may indeed be living through a crisis of attention.

But perhaps it isn't simply that people can no longer concentrate.

Perhaps everyone is asking for their attention at once, the exit is always visible, and too many of us responded by making the same thing, only faster.

The goldfish may not have won after all.

It just had fewer tabs open.